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Maple Leafs doing right by Morgan Rielly: Feschuk

The Leafs defenceman made a mistake earlier this week and coach Mike Babcock shrugged it off. Exactly the opposite of how P.K. Subban was treated in Montreal by his coach. The Leafs got it right.

Leafs defenceman Morgan Rielly had a team-high 26 minutes of ice time against the Flyers on Saturday night. This reflects the team's confidence in him and he clearly has a long-term future with the rebulding squad. (Melissa Renwick / Toronto Star)

And yet for all the back and forth, for the dozens of changes in possession, maybe it’s human nature to fixate on singular moments of perceived failure. This past week, Canada’s two biggest hockey hothouses heated up over a couple.

You probably saw them both. In one, Toronto’s Morgan Rielly was stripped of a puck a few feet from the Toronto net, a turnover that led directly to a Ranger goal that turned a late-game tie into a 4-2 loss on Thursday night. In another, Montreal’s P.K. Subban was angling to make an offensive push from the left point on Wednesday night in Colorado when he lost the puck and lost an edge. On the ensuing rush, the Avalanche scored what turned out to be the winning goal.

The public reaction from the respective coaches was markedly different. Toronto coach Mike Babcock shrugged off Rielly’s faux pas as an unfortunate but understandable mistake.

“When you turn it over, you turn it over, right?” Babcock said. “He didn’t mean to do it. He’s a good player for us.”

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Montreal coach Michel Therrien, meanwhile, benched Subban for the final couple of minutes of the game, blamed Subban for making a selfish play, and criticized the Montreal “market” for sensationalizing the whole affair.

All of it got defencemen lamenting about how they are often unjustifiably singled out.

“Forwards turn it over all the time and no one hears about it. But anytime we do it, it’s a lot bigger deal,” Leafs Jake Gardiner was saying this week. “You’ve just got to move on from it.”

Rielly was attempting to do that in Saturday night’s 5-4 overtime loss to the Philadelphia Flyers. Conditions weren’t optimal. On a night when Jonathan Bernier was chased after giving up three goals on 13 shots, the injury-depleted Maple Leafs, down 3-1 less than a minute into the second period, were playing without a slew of veteran players, among them Rielly’s usual partner on the blueline, Matt Hunwick. Rielly played alongside Frank Corrado for a spell, and later Martin Marincin. It was nobody’s idea of a defensive-zone clinic, and Rielly was on the ice for four of Philly’s goals, including the OT winner, scored 29 seconds into the three-on-three period by Shayne Gostisbehere.

Still, given that Rielly logged a team-high 26 minutes of ice time, the evening amounted to another valuable session in the continuing education of one of the rare roster players who figures to be in Toronto’s long-term plans.

“Things are going to happen out there you want back. That’s just the way of life. You have to learn to deal with it,” Rielly said in the lead-up to the game. “But at the same time, you have to learn to limit mistakes. It’s always the big ones that stand out. So if you can limit those ones, that means you’re doing something right. You’d like to take it back. But you can’t. You’ve got to learn to move on and build a tough skin.”

Subban had shown the way on Friday night in Montreal, when he had two assists in nearly 31 minutes of ice time in a 3-2 shootout win over the Flyers wherein fans chanted, “P.K.! P.K.!”

“I always feel I play my best hockey when people want to pick me apart,” Subban told reporters in Montreal. “It’s a game of mistakes. Sometimes it’s going to go your way. Sometimes it’s not. I’m not afraid of failure. It happens sometimes. But that’s how you become successful.”

That’s exactly the correct attitude. Centrepiece players can’t let the fear of criticism turn them into periphery contributors. But Therrien’s conservatism is the coaching fraternity’s standard outlook. Most of the hockey world’s bench bosses prefer the safe play over the aggressive one; that’s one of the reasons why the NHL is suffering through an offence-starved era that has seen scoring plummet to its lowest level since 2003-04.

Subban, as one of the most effective drivers of offence in the sport, shouldn’t change the way he plays simply because he made a less-than-perfect play that, by the way, could have been rendered moot by a more credible bit of back-checking from Montreal captain Max Pacioretty.

And as for Rielly — as Babcock’s supportive public reaction to this week’s misstep suggested, this season is the ideal time to learn what he can and can’t do with the puck. He has logged more minutes than any Maple Leaf this season and he won’t turn 22 years old until next month. As Roman Polak, the veteran defenceman, was saying this week: Given the frequency players like Rielly and Gardiner carry the play, they’re bound to make the occasional wayward one.

“He’s playing all the time with the puck. Even Gardiner, all the time with the puck. So they might make a mistake in the game,” Polak said. “They’re playing over 20 minutes. But they make so many good plays, so it doesn’t matter if they make one mistake.”

The trick, Polak said, is not to allow one’s confidence to go south when an important play goes sideways.

“(Rielly is) strong mentally and it’s a good thing,” Polak. “You have to be strong to be in this game.”

And there was Rielly in Saturday’s third period, engineering one forceful rush and then another in an attempt to will a win — back on the proverbial horse and riding hard.

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